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Monthly Archives: March 2018

In the European services and cloud computing research community, the International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER) has been a meeting point for academics and applied researchers for almost a decade. This year, CLOSER 2018 took place in Santa Cruz at the Portuguese island of Madeira. As for any commercially organised conference series, there are certain expectations for how well the conference is run, and there is a lot to learn for us to drive community-organised conferences and to sense the participation in cloud conferences in general. On the technical side, we presented an international collaboration work at this conference, and we dived into the respective works of others. This blog post reports about our interpretation of both the organisational and technical aspects of CLOSER 2018.

Often, researchers produce results which are neither re-used nor transferred to practice, and businesses ask for solutions which have been existing for a long time albeit perhaps not in packaged and polished form. Such misunderstandings should not happen; rather, the goal must be to align the innovation needs of businesses and the wider industry with the capabilities of researchers. For this purpose, Science Meets Industry has been proposed as a new event format to bring together scientific researchers and practitioners, in particular in the domain of information technology.

The first Science Meets Industry event was jointly organised by Silicon Saxony and its Cool Silicon cluster of excellence, and hosted by four co-located Fraunhofer institutes. Josef Spillner from the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences had been invited as keynote speaker and shared his thoughts about «Serverless Cyber-Physical Applications» which connected well with other talk topics during the event. This blog post not only reports briefly about the event, but details the thoughts behind talk and reflects on the need for innovation alignment by incorporating feedback and additional ideas from the discussions after the talk.

In April 2017 we had announced work on an open marketplace for cloud functions, lambdas and other serverless application artefacts and launched a first static website at Github Pages. The project was sidelined, but in January 2018 we made the implementation called Function Hub publicly available and have since been running a stateless dynamic demo instance with the backend running Snafu in passive mode in our APPUiO Swiss Container Platform account. You can use any deployment tool (awscli, wsk, gcloud) to submit your cloud functions and make them available globally.

It took Amazon a bit longer until February 2018 to announce their AWS Serverless Application Repository but of course there it is now with, at the time of writing, 181 entries. We assume that it will grow rapidly and developers will very much rely on it in the future, similarly to how Docker Hub has become an essential ingredient for modern application development, and see the need for researchers to (1) gain insight into cloud function marketplace usage, (2) propose superior designs, and (3) from an applied perspective of strengthening the economies of souvereign countries, assist in developing viable alternatives. This blog post therefore briefly discusses our state of function hub design and prototypical architecture which is shared work with the Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing research group at Itaipu Technology Park, Paraguay.